“Eritis mihi testes” Sound Recordings of the 1938 International Eucharistic Congress

The 34th International Eucharistic Congress, held in Budapest between 25 and 29 May 1938, proved to be an outstanding event not only in the public and cultural history of Hungary in the 20th century, but also in the history of Hungarian sound recordings. Three types of audio documents – four audiovisual ones, including the newsreels of the time – have preserved the events of the Congress: commercial gramophone records, studio recordings preserved on discs by the Magyar Rádió (Hungarian Radio Corporation), and private recordings of contemporaneous radio broadcasts. These three types of documents present the Eucharistic Congress from three different perspectives: the Radiola recordings were intended to support the preparations, the studio recordings made by the Magyar Rádió and cut to disc enriched the historical recordings of the Rádió’s sound museum, while the private recordings of the live radio broadcasts preserved the atmosphere of the Congress events like snapshots. Just as the International Eucharistic Congress series will return to Budapest in 2021, the archival audio documents of the 1938 event will be made available to the public for the first time in 2021. The CD supplement of this publication contains a representative selection of the surviving audio recordings, while the full audio material will be accessible later as part of the National Széchényi Library’s online content services.

‘Eritis mihi testes’ – ‘You shall be My witnesses’ – these were the words with which Jesus bade farewell to His disciples at His ascension, and the words based on which Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, Papal Legate, recorded on Magyar Rádió, delivered the closing speech of the Congress. These recordings are not only a testimony to the events of the 34th International Eucharistic Congress, but also a testimony to the faith of thousands of people, most of them born in the 19th century.